permalink: /142/crossover_office_3_0/

I’m happy to see the WINE project move forward, and I’m happy some of the people that are doing so are actually getting paid for it. Codeweavers is a company that sells a commercial version of WINE called Crossover Office. Many of the developers employed by Codeweavers work on the main Wine project as well. WINE, which stands for “WINE Is Not an Emulator,” lets you run Microsoft Windows applications natively under Linux without requiring an installation of Windows. It’s not an emulator in the sense that it maps Windows system calls to the appropriate calls on Linux.

Codeweavers product does have some “secret sauce” not in the open source version, namely a nicer installer, the ability to also run Windows-only browser plugins under Linux, a list of supported apps (mostly Microsoft Office-type applications), and technical support. Furthermore, the company is upstanding. In their recent announcement, they’ve made sure that everyone who may have purchased Crossover Office will get a copy of 3.0 despite possibly being “out of support.” This isn’t the first time they’ve done it either. With the delays in Microsoft’s next OS, it kinda makes all those people wonder who bought “Software Assurance” what they really got for their money.